Katalon and QualityKiosk collaborate to help India-Based Bank Automate Testing of Oracle FLEXCUBE

Customer

The customer is a large India-based financial services and banking company with over 700 branches across India.  It is one of the first banks in India to achieve full networking of its branches through its Core Banking System. The Bank was also one of the pioneers in deploying ATMs, Check Deposit Kiosks, Internet Banking, Mobile Banking, and other digital technologies that provide its customers with automated banking services. The Bank has also implemented end-to-end digital processing of retail and commercial loans, eliminating paper in the process.

Challenge

The customer sought to bring all its digital services onto a single, integrated Core Banking platform using Oracle's FLEXCUBE Retail and FLEXCUBE Corporate applications. Oracle’s FLEXCUBE platform offers a comprehensive product portfolio across deposits and lending coupled with centralized product management and administration. Further, FLEXCUBE provides integrated workflows and straight-through-processing (STP) functionality that helps optimize back-office operations. Overall, FLEXCUBE performs more than 250 business operations for this bank. This created a challenge for the bank to have to test so many operations manually every time a change was made to the FLEXCUBE platform. 

One of the FLEXCUBE teams noted that before the implementation of Katalon, "there was no automation process" for testing application changes. "So when a batch of changes came, it was impossible to do regression testing of the 250 operations. It would take a significant amount of time and a large group of people to manually test the entire platform." 

So, testing teams could only test parts of applications resulting in lower test coverage and significant risk every time a new change was pushed to production. 

Solution

The Bank knew it needed an automated software testing capability to test all the mission-critical business processes that FLEXCUBE supported.  Katalon provided a means to simplify, automate, and streamline the testing process across the Oracle suite.  The Bank selected with QualityKiosk and Katalon for several reasons including: 

• QualityKiosk is a leader in helping financial services customers to adopt automated testing and has a strong track record of automating core banking systems, including Oracle FLEXCUBE.  
• QualityKiosk also strongly recommended that the Bank uses Katalon as the platform to develop its test automation for FLEXCUBE.
• The Katalon platform is turnkey; The Bank’s quality engineering team could immediately start with ready-made test scenarios in Katalon, keywords, and object repositories. The Bank also appreciated how easy Katalon was to use for non-technical users.  The team did not have to wait for an expert programmer to build test scripts in Katalon. Instead, a team leader said, "non-technical people were able to build scripts." Neither did the Bank have to spend a lot of time creating scripts or becoming coding experts to get quick results from Katalon automated tests. And the ease with which the Bank was able to author its user-defined functions was a boon to receiving fast results from tests they wanted to run on the fly. 
• Additionally, Katalon was very extensible to support the Bank’s unique requirements.  FLEXCUBE testers at the Bank could create multiple user-defined functions in Katalon that would perform like reusable components. "For instance," one team member pointed out, "we could use them [user-defined functions] in different operational areas like login and logout." They could apply the user-defined functions while they were creating scripts in Katalon. These capabilities significantly sped up test-creation and -execution times and reduced the number of staff required for regression testing.

Results and Outcomes

The results of transitioning from manual- to automated testing with QualityKiosk and Katalon were remarkable. A Bank team lead said, "Manually, testing may sometimes take around 8- to 10-days. So for that 8- to 10-days, we may need one or two resources to perform the testing. We then have to consider the costs for each resource. But  those [costs] are saved using automation!"

The Bank’s quality engineering team saw a 40%-50% reduction in test execution time. Overall, they estimate they saved nearly 60% overall. They could use the time savings to increase development team productivity in other ways, like adding new functionality to Oracle FLEXCUBE.

Testing processes that used to take the Bank 12 minutes to run manually dropped to 7 minutes when they introduced Katalon tools into the environment. And, because the Bank could schedule Katalon scripts to run anytime during the day or night, the Bank was able to see extraordinary efficiencies in total runtimes for test cases during work weeks.

Further, the Bank observed total test times dramatically drop from 46 hours to 27 hours. The Bank’s quality engineering team estimates it saved between 2- and 3-man-months each month by using Katalon coupled with expertise from QualityKiosk. 

Lessons Learned and Next Steps

The Bank has saved a great deal of time and overhead by reducing staff it had committed to manual testing. The Bank has also been able to both specify and expand its test coverage through Katalon. 

"Manually," a team member noted, "we could only cover one test sequence at a time. With Katalon, though, we have test data from previous tests and we can run new combinations of tests we weren't able to before, increasing our coverage."

The Bank was also excited about its new-found ability through Katalon to be able to test across all 230 business operations in FLEXCUBE in a single test session. "Through automation," a bank’s project leader said, "we can easily perform overnight execution, and optimize our test coverage during non-peak hours."

The Bank has had to take a long journey through manual testing to discover the need for an automated test platform like Katalon's. Now, the Bank knows, there's no turning back from the ease of use and efficiencies Katalon has brought to the Bank’s software development processes.